I wrote a thing and you can finally finally read it! It’s about how “bad,” edited profile pictures in matchmaking + online dating turn out to be “good,” meaningful, and useful. Featuring my silly face, Japanese and Pan-Asian photographic practices, CS Pierce, and musings on Chinese selfie apps + makeup. Open access!

But you know, it also absolutely stings to get the reprieve and the focus that I need? I feel so guilty. Like I'm letting my department and colleagues down. Like they'll think less of me from now on, like I've proved unreliable, like they'll never think of me the same way.

Kind of feels like I'm ruining my career, like I've accrued debts I can never repay. My partner, bless him, insists that this is going to save my career, if anything.

So my book didn't get written. The extent to which my publisher can be flexible about a second deadline extension is... limited, but they're trying. Still, I'm absolutely at the end of my rope, and something had to give. I decided that something was going to have to be teaching.

I am SO FUCKING GRATEFUL to the colleagues who stepped in to help me out, at the end of the semester, with scheduling already in place for next term.

(What happened? 2 deaths in the family, 1 death of a friend/my department chair. Unearthed family secrets and my mother divorcing my stepfather in the way of her mother's death. An insecure housing situation with unreliable hot water, clean water, or sometimes any water at all. Moving house due to all of this. Advocacy on behalf of queer and mentally ill students in untenable situations. And my father was hospitalized last week as a bonus.)

So next semester, with the help of super supportive colleagues, I'm taking a break from teaching to FINALLY finish my book, and, while I'm at it, recover from the Actual Worst Year of my life.

In truth, this year has been so spectacularly bad that I would defy anyone to get through it without needing some kind of break. Mental ill health comes for us all at some point or another, previous diagnoses or not.

Initial proceedings from CALA 2019 have been published! so if you want to hear some of my academic reasons why Tinder is #theworst you can read a short version in the proceedings! (Longer version to be published in good time, book version... in the works.) Open access for everyone! https://cala.asia/cala-2019-proceedings/

One day, in an absolute fit of elderly curmudgeonliness, I am going to stop accepting papers that do not indent the beginnings of paragraphs (especially when those paragraphs are also not separated by white space as in standard web style).

For as I tell my students, lo, I am old, my eyes are bad, they pass over many papers, and THEY ARE TIRED.

Whether or not they’re deliberately being misleading, more often than not, researchers still don’t do a gender analysis. In the review of federally funded trials...above, 75 percent of the studies did not report any outcomes by gender, & 64 percent did not provide any analysis by racial or ethnic groups.

–Maya Dusenberry, "Doing Harm"

you read right—tons of doctors who don't know & don't want to know if sex, gender, or race really change anything about biology.

I wrote a thing and you can finally finally read it! It’s about how “bad,” edited profile pictures in matchmaking + online dating turn out to be “good,” meaningful, and useful. Featuring my silly face, Japanese and Pan-Asian photographic practices, CS Pierce, and musings on Chinese selfie apps + makeup. Open access!